Maya Hawke: Chaos Theory
Photo credit: Andrew Lyman
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Despite releasing two well-received albums of folk-tinged pop in 2020 and 2022, actress Maya Hawke didn’t really consider herself a musician until making her third record, Chaos Angel.
“I used to see myself solely as a poet in a band,” Hawke says over Zoom, while sitting on a porch in Atlanta during a break in filming the final season of Netflix’s sci fi mega-hit Stranger Things. “I think this record, and what I’ve been doing since, has been the journey of me starting to see myself as a musician, not just a poet in a band.”
Boasting an expansive sonic palette, erudite lyrics and big hooks, Chaos Angel, which was released this past May, showcases Hawke’s newfound sense of confidence in her craft. She not only co-wrote the words to all 10 songs, as she always has, but this time, also helped write the music to nearly every track. “I’m not a great guitar player at all,” she says. “I play chords and I can finger-pick a little, but I love to use it to come up with melodies for songs.”
As a singer and songwriter, Hawke borrows from the best—a little Joni Mitchell here, a little Taylor Swift there, a dash of Feist sprinkled in between. The most experimental track on Chaos Angel, the Auto-Tuned mantra “Better,” even owes a debt to James Blake’s vocal manipulations.
Hawke credits her Chaos Angel producer, the singer-songwriter Christian Lee Hutson, for helping her start to view herself more as a musician. The pair first met over email, co-writing for Hawke’s 2022 album Moss. “I knew I wanted him to make this record as soon as we finished Moss because what I felt in the process of making that was that he really had a determination to have my voice be heard,” Hawke says of Hutson, who has collaborated with Phoebe Bridgers, Hand Habits and Conor Oberst. “He cares that the artist who he’s producing is represented within the record. If you have an idea in the room, he’s not going, ‘Is that a good idea or a bad idea?’ He’s going, ‘That’s the artist’s idea: How can we make the song a bed with which the artist’s idea can flourish?’”
Hutson knows how easy it is to fall into the trap of studio tricks, getting away from the core of who you really are as a musician or songwriter. “The most helpful thing that other people have done for me is to try and remind me that being myself is the most important thing,” Hutson says. “So the intention with her was very much that kind of thing. She’s an amazing writer and singer, and that should be enough.”
It helps that Hawke is a prolific and open songwriter. “She has so much to say,” Hutson says. “I write with a ton of people, and maybe you write one stanza, or half a verse, and then you go have lunch. Maya is very good at being like, ‘Here’s this and this and that.’ I’m always kind of amazed by how quickly her brain moves and how she’s not critical of ideas as they come out. She doesn’t seem to need to trick herself into thinking that she’s a writer, which is a different speed for me because every time I have to write anything, I’m like, ‘OK, now you’re gonna pretend like you write.’ It’s like making fun of yourself along the way.”
The pair are dating—Hawke doesn’t have a license, so Hutson drove her from D.C. to the Stranger Things set in Atlanta during an airline snafu over the summer—and Hawke co-wrote and sings with Bridgers on Hutson’s solo LP, Paradise Pop. 10. “We had a pretty good working relationship just over email for a while, and then once we were in-person, we realized that we had all the same interests and favorite weird little artists that we liked,” Hutson says. “So we developed a pretty fast rapport.”
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Though she found fame through film and TV, like her parents Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, Maya actually played her first concert at 13 before she’d ever acted on a soundstage. The show, at the since-shuttered West Village coffee shop and music venue Caffe Vivaldi, was an intimate gig for friends and family only. “There was something about that experience that turned me off from music for a while,” she says. “It was so vulnerable and so intense. I kind of let it go for a while, or kept it as something that was just for me and people I had a crush on.”
Instead, Maya focused on acting, writing poetry and, like her mom before her, modeling. For a while there, she thought she might get a degree in poetry and become a teacher. “Then I got a really bad SAT score and didn’t get into any liberal arts colleges and only got into drama schools. So, I very joyfully went to drama school,” she says.
In 2017, Maya booked her first major acting gig in the BBC adaptation of Little Women and dropped out of Juilliard. While filming in Ireland, her mom and brother, Levon Hawke, flew out to visit her on set. “I didn’t bring my guitar because I hadn’t been playing seriously at all,” Maya says. “My mom brought it to me without me asking for it, and I had a really intense relationship with getting it back. I cried a lot; It was so embarrassing. My brother took it out and played a bunch on it, and he was so much better than I’d ever been. He’d gotten better while I wasn’t looking. I felt like my guitar wasn’t gonna forgive me. Like Harry Potter’s wand, it was gonna change its loyalty to my brother. That was the moment that I started playing again and started writing songs again.”
At first, Maya was very self-conscious about launching a music career, which is why Blush, released in 2020, is so straightforward and simple—at times a step above bedroom indie-folk. “I was extremely worried that—because I was an actor and already on Stranger Things and because I grew up in New York and my parents are my parents—people would kind of perceive this project as something coming from outside of me. I thought they’d think that I like bought a record—called the producer and was like, ‘Make me sound good,’” says Maya, who co-wrote the album with Norah Jones collaborator Jesse Harris. “There’s no double vocal, there’s barely any harmony. It’s a very dry vocal. There’s almost no reverb. There’s mostly only live band takes. I really wanted it to sound like music happening in a room and not trigger anyone’s ear to go, ‘Oh, that actress got a pop producer.’”
Maya had completely let go of that baggage by the time she released Chaos Angel on her longtime label, the venerable indie Mom + Pop. The album holds true to Maya’s musicians-in-a-room ethos but takes more risks and embraces big pop hooks. For “Missing Out,” the LP’s catchiest earworm, she crafted a narrative that winks at the internet’s perception of her—she has nearly 10 million Instagram followers—before the song explodes into a catchy chorus of ascending voices. A truly collaborative effort, “Missing Out” began as a pre-chorus she started writing with Levon on their childhood trampoline after putting out a forest fire with a river stone. It started to come together when her Blush co producer Benjamin Lazar Davis (Okkervil River) came up with the chorus part while they prepped for a show at the Colony in Woodstock, N.Y. (which Levon opened). Then Maya filled in the verses.
“I was in this dinner conversation, and this girl said that she wanted to write the next Great American Novel. And it sent me into a really interesting spiral,” Maya recalls. “She was a couple years my junior, and I remembered having dreams like that: I wanted to be the best actor or the best singer, and I realized that I’d lost that dream. I didn’t want to be the best anymore. At first, I was really sad about it, and then I started feeling like that was actually the right way for me to feel. That’s kind of what that song is about, with an additional flavor of feeling a little bit misunderstood, both by my friends at the time and the internet. So the first two verses are, in many ways, like a personification of the idea of myself that I see online. I stole a little bit from Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’ philosophy: Write from the point of view of the character that people perceive you to be. The bridge is a request to release that character.”
Much like the range she’s displayed as an actress in such films as Asteroid City, Do Revenge and Maestro, Hawke is adept at modulating her voice, from the hushed tones of “Promise” to the bold pop of “Missing Out” and the ethereal “Hang in There.” She’s a clever songwriter, too: “I’m your guitar/ Mute me gently with the palm of your hand,” she offers on “Dark.”
Album-opener “Black Ice,” which features vocal contributions from her Stranger Things co-star Sadie Sink and her brother Levon, is Hutson’s favorite track on Chaos Angel. “I think we were just hanging out, and Maya kept singing the first verse of it over and over again. It would constantly get stuck in my head,” Hutson recalls. “And I was like, ‘Whoa, dude, what is that song? It sounds like it’s as old as time.’ I felt like I knew it. And then she’d be like, ‘It’s actually nothing.’ I kept being like, ‘I really wish that you would write that song because I want to hear how the rest of it goes.’ That was one of the most magical things, watching her write it.”
Hutson and Maya surrounded themselves with a mix of frequent collaborators, including her longtime guitarist Will Graefe and previous producers Harris and Davis. They also welcomed some new friends— jazz bass and synth pro Shahzad Ismaily appears on a pair of songs, and Lake Street Dive’s Bridget Kearney co-wrote a trio of tracks. Though not an outright concept album, Maya views Chaos Angel as a myth, of sorts, to warn current and future generations of the traps of modern life and relationships.
“An alternate title to this was Promises because I really wanted to write a record about this thing that I was perceiving in myself and in the world, which is that people were putting themselves in a state of joy. People were winding up in situations and over committing themselves. And by overcommitting themselves, they were sucking all the joy out of the situation and needing to explode the situation, to get as far away from it as possible because they’ve now trapped themselves,” Maya explains. “I wanted to make a record that asks: How do we make more accurate promises to each other? As young people, how do we give ourselves relationship paradigms and examples that we are capable of thriving in, instead of overcommitting ourselves and then punishing ourselves for hurting people or getting hurt?
“Chaos Angel sort of mythologizes that idea because that’s how we’ve learned lessons for centuries as humans. We realize a fundamental truth, and then we create a story like ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ to illustrate that fundamental truth. We are not perfect and we are not capable of pure, unencumbered, committed love affairs from the age we graduate from high school. It takes learning and stumbling and making mistakes, hurting someone and getting hurt. If we all were able to have a better grasp on that, I think that we would all have a lot more empathy for each other and move with more grace.”
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Chaos Angel came out just two weeks before the biggest blockbuster of Maya’s burgeoning film career, Pixar’s Inside Out 2, was released. The animated film has already grossed more than $1.6 billion globally as of press time. She has a pair of music-related film projects in the works: Revolver, the story of a Beatles mega-fan who sets out to seduce George Harrison (the movie also features her dad, who recently directed Maya in Wildcat), and Wilder & Me, which centers on a musician in the 1970s who works with famed director Billy Wilder.
In Inside Out 2, Maya voices Anxiety, a new emotion for Riley, the teen girl at the center of both installments in the series. Anxiety, which Maya has grappled with and written about in her music, quickly starts creating chaos in Riley’s life, something that was easy for her to relate to. “I was a really depressed kid, getting picked on in school for being dyslexic and not feeling good about myself, and the arts were a space where there were no grades,” Maya says. “I really was not thriving as a kid in any way, except I found a home for myself in the arts, and that was, you know, an important thing for [my parents] to encourage. Because, other than that, I had nothing. I changed schools a lot. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I didn’t get good grades. The school play and playing songs and watercoloring were what I did to survive.”
After Stranger Things finally wraps, Maya plans to tour on Chaos Angel, and she’s already working on her next record. “My goal for every record is that someone will give me permission to make another one,” she says.
That’s something this musician shouldn’t have to worry about anytime soon.
